The sound of brass and wind instruments rang out with a triumphant blast, echoing down a corridor and around a hallway where Tim Burton was seated inside a pavilion where a traveling exhibition devoted to his new movie, "Frankenweenie," was on display. When the music was simply too loud to ignore, Burton took a moment to quip: "I hope you don't mind, I'm rehearsing my new band. Up With People."

Such are the perils of promoting a movie at the happiest place on Earth. On a sweltering recent Sunday afternoon, Burton was fielding questions at Disney's California Adventure about his latest stop-motion animated film, a feature-length revision of a short he made in 1984. The black-and-white 3-D movie keeps the same premise: A young boy from the suburbs borrows a page from Mary Shelley's famous mad scientist to resurrect his beloved bull terrier Sparky after he's hit by a car.

"Frankenweenie" features plenty of homages to classic monster movies -- those produced by Universal Studios in the 1930s, as well as atomic horror from the 1950s; there's even a cameo from Christopher Lee as Dracula in one of England's Hammer Film productions.

But looking down on the miniature artifacts represented in the "Art of Frankenweenie" exhibit -- replicas of record players, plastic Christmas decorations and resin grapes scattered among the sketches and models -- Burton made sure to note that the movie geek references were just window-dressing for a personal story about processing grief and coping with loss.

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"I was a boy once," Burton, 54, said of his personal investment in the story. "I had a dog. It was based on that first kind of pure relationship. It was quite unconditional, your first love, in a way. He also had this thing called distemper -- they said he wasn't going to live for very long, and he ended up living quite a long time, but there was always this specter hanging over. You're a kid, you don't really understand it, but that's where the whole thing sort of stemmed from."

"Frankenweenie" has almost all the trappings that have become so synonymous with Burton's works, though frequent collaborator Johnny Depp is conspicuously absent from the film's cast of voice actors. The movie unfolds from the vantage point of a lovable outsider named Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan), another in a long line of misunderstood protagonists dreamed up by Burton, who dwells in a high-contrast realm of misfits and oddballs.

Victor's hometown of New Holland is an obvious stand-in for Burton's native Burbank, though it's an American suburbia that exists out of time. Victor's dad is a travel agent and his mom stays at home baking cookies and vacuuming the house. They both love their boy, even if they fall short of understanding him.

"Frankenweenie" was shot over the course of 2½ years inside a converted warehouse in East London close to where the newly constructed Olympic stadium was built. About 200 puppets -- including 16 Sparkys (eight dead, eight alive), 14 Victors and such new creations as Edgar (Atticus Shaffer), Elsa Van Helsing (Winona Ryder) and Weird Girl (Catherine O'Hara, who also voices Victor's mother) -- were manufactured for the production.

Burton reunited with producer Allison Abbate and animation director Trey Thomas, both of whom worked on the filmmaker's earlier stop-motion projects, "A Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Corpse Bride."

Although stop-motion is enjoying a new vogue -- "Frankenweenie" is the third such animated movie to open in three months, coming on the heels of Laika Studios' zombie comedy "ParaNorman" and an English-language version of the Czech film "Toys in the Attic" -- expertise in the specific subset of the animation world is hard to come by. Patience is a must; it can sometimes take an animator one week to complete a single shot.

Their unique skill sets make it easier for them to practically translate Burton's ideas to the screen, which was especially important for this film, the director said. The entire movie was filtered through the lens of his memories of people and places, though it's another longtime Burton colleague, John August ("Big Fish," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Corpse Bride"), who wrote the screenplay.

"There's a few movies that were very much in my mind, like '(Edward) Scissorhands' or this or 'Nightmare,' where I just felt like I knew what it was, and so when you're working with a writer sometimes it helps to confirm or flesh it out," Burton said. "It's just nice to bounce off of something. ... Also, because I'm kind of hermetically sealed, sometimes it's good to have a little bit of a link to the outside world."